Top 10 Virgin Mary Sightings

There are some biblical miracles that one wishes were based on more than just heady gossip among desert dwellers with bugs in their ears who lived a couple thousand years ago. Turning water into wine would be a pretty neat trick, bonus points if you’re able to fool a wine snob in a blind taste test comparison with the good stuff. Being able to raise the dead could also come in handy, though you’d really have to hose down the recently deceased if he or she has been in said state for any length of time.

One miracle that we’re glad is relegated to the pages of biblical lore is the virgin birth. The account of the conception in St. Luke (1:34-35) reads: “Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?” ….and the retort was: “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee.” (And Mary might have been thinking, “And what if I’m not into that?”)

Since Maury Povich was not yet available to serve as the final arbiter of genetic provenance, Joseph accepted the shocking revelation of his virgin’s wife’s pregnancy like a gentleman, without even kicking the mailman’s ass. Were this to take place in the modern day, it’s doubtful that guys would be so accepting, and repeated miraculous happenings such as this would no doubt sow social disorder.

(Sharks are capable of parthenogenesis, or virgin births – we’re not sure how this newly discovered fact affects our branding).

The virgin birth is one of the pillars of the Christian religion. Another pillar of the faith seems to be religious icons popping up in places in less than cataclysmic circumstances. Like her only begotten son (click here for Jesus Sightings) or a Facebook friend with a Europass and a digital camera, the Virgin Mary has been spotted everywhere.

Given the lacklustre spots where she’s chosen to manifest, one must ask, to borrow the words of the immortal 80s rap group RUN DMC, “Mary Mary, why you buggin?”

Here are our Top 10 Virgin Mary Sightings!

10. Our Landlady of Fantima: Virgin Mary in Texas Apartment complex.

When religious apparitions appear, they very rarely do so, on, say, some rich guy’s tennis court. Usually it’s somewhere like here, on an exterior wall of an apartment building in hellhole Texas where the three growth areas are poverty, unemployment and crime.

The faithful here spotted the Virgin on the wall and rather than possibly looking down to see what was being reflected, decided that they were being told by the divine to mend their ways or else.

While skeptics said that the ghostly apparition on the wall of this California condo complex was an optical illusion, tenants said it arrived “at the time they needed it most”, unlike, say, a cop in their neighbourhood.

Fittingly, given the high crime rate the area, this supposed vision bears a strong resemblance to a police chalk outline.

9. Holy crap? Bird Droppings Mary

As one tongue-in-cheek broadcast put it, “A dropping from the heavens made people of Bryant, Texas take notice.”

Yep, Texas again, and just to continue strengthening stereotypes, the mystical missile splattered all over someone’s pickup truck. One would have to marvel at the thought process of someone who, upon whose truck a bird hath shat, looks at it closely enough to discern recognizable figures.

8. Roots of Faith: Tree Trunk Mary

A Toronto man drinking beer in his garden, though he wasn’t drunk, mind you — “I’m not a wacko,” he said — spotted what he took to be the blessed virgin on a tree in his neighbour’s garden. Mr Magnanimous announced it a miracle, but said that it wasn’t just his miracle; it belonged to everyone and he encouraged people to see it. Again, the tree was not in his yard.

The owner of the tree said that the gentleman in question could have as many people as he liked over on his balcony to peer at the biblical bark, but that she didn’t want people trampling all over her garden.

Asked whether she shared her neighbour’s conviction that the Virgin Mary had made herself known in her back yard, the woman laughed, and said that no miracle was involved — Mary was merely the scarring from where a limb had been chopped off.

7. Golden Griddle Mary

Just as holy icons are likely to turn up in places frequented by the rich, they are also rarely spotted at restaurants that aren’t another pit-stop on the highway to a premature death. Like her son, who has made appearances in chocolate bars and fish sticks, mother Mary likes to make herself known to those who will be meeting her sooner than their healthier eating counterparts.

She made herself known recently to the person cleaning a griddle at a restaurant on the California Mexico border. The report of this discovery states that hundreds have flocked to see the grill since that time, and one would assume that means the griddle has not been cleaned since that time.

For those dining at restaurants where cleanliness may not be next to godliness, further visions can be expected at your hotel room once the food poisoning sets in.

6. Barber Shop Mary

The Virgin Mary also appeared at a California barbershop, not to film one of the sequels to that comedy series, but to inspire in another way.

It must be said though, that she inspired some more than others — such as the wag who said it “looked like the Statue of Liberty.”

This vaguely Picasso-esque image looks more like the Man in the Moon if the man in question was a woman.

5.Virgin Mary in George Foreman Grill

George Foreman claims he was divinely inspired after his famous loss to Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire and speaking of the effects of sustaining too many blows to the head, there were reports of Our Lady of Loreto appearing in a Foreman Grill in Missouri.

Missouri is often described as the “Show-me” state, and fewer people need to take that to heart.

A hamburger line cook said he saw the Holy Mother’s face in leftover grease, which is surely a sign, if not of divinity, then that statin drugs are in someone’s not so distant future.

The grease was in a small plastic drip pan that catches the grease and other fluids that run off the grill. The man saved the grease in his refrigerator so he could show his friends and the makers of the George Foreman Grill.

4. Hallelujah on the Half-Shell: Virgin Mary Pet Turtle

Turtles are slightly more difficult than rocks to keep as pets, but yet they often end up ignored and left to rot by children with short attention spans and a complete unwillingness to have their childhoods shortened by waiting for a boring pet turtle to do something fun.

One would think if you were the 2,000+ year old mother of the head of a major religion and you wanted to make yourself known to the world, you’d pick a pet that gets a bit more attention than a turtle. Put yourself on one of the front paws of a dancing dog, maybe.

Still an Illinois woman claims the image of the Virgin appeared on her pet sand turtle, according to a Chicago Sun-Times reports. Her daughter, 58, said: “I thought we were going crazy the first time I saw it. I looked at it and said, ‘It can’t be.’ But then I looked again. I mean, you can’t deny it.”

Yes, we can.

The owner has since renamed the turtle “Mary” and its tank mate “Joseph.”

3.Virgin Mary Stain

One wonders how much water damage to walls and buildings has gone untreated due to the faithful not wanting to disturb images of religious icons.Here the water stain appeared, fittingly enough, at the baptismal font at a church in Norfolk Virginia. If there’s one place where someone is going to look at a water stain and see the Virgin Mary and not, say, that superhero woman who can make it snow, it’s at a baptismal font in Virginia.

The church’s reverend initially thought that Virgin Mary was at risk of over-saturating the market, so he didn’t report the sighting. “I thought, well she’s been appearing everywhere, she’s on toast and so on and so forth so I thought we’ll just keep quiet and let it be,” he said. Of course, others noticed and talk of miraculous water stains — as opposed to the kind you get on the wall next to a gas station toilet — commenced.

2.Spud Mary

A Vista California woman came home from the grocery store with a bag of potatoes. Removing several from the bag and placing them on the counter she was instantly struck by one potato’s similarity in shape to that of a Madonna cradling the baby Jesus. She thinks the likeness is startling, while we’re inclined to believe that the sculptures of Henry Moore resemble potatoes. So different strokes, then.

1.Virgin Mary Salsa (Not an illicit Catholic dance)

A woman in Bakersfield was mixing salsa like someone possessed by the devil. So intense was her salsa making, that some splashed all over her wall. When she was finished, presumably sweating and exhausted, dabbing her forehead with a towel and thanking the lord she only made it once a year, she noticed that the wall salsa had dripped into a familiar form.

A half-man, half -dog with a jetpack, and a briefcase you say? Well, no, the Virgin Mary, though the half dog thing would have been cool.